14 – 15 March 2019
thestudio, Manchester
Workshop
Building a Brand-Driven Message Architecture
13th March 2019
A one-day pre-conference workshop with Margot Bloomstein
About the Workshop
Complement your practice of user experience design with brand-driven content strategy. In this workshop, you’ll get up to speed on the philosophy, questions, tools and exercises to implement it.
We’ll conduct a hands-on exercise to prioritise communication goals and develop a message architecture - ideal whether you design and create content for the web, mobile apps, social media, print collateral or other experiences.
If you’ve had it with drawn out engagements and seagulling stakeholders, you’re among friends. Using BrandSort, discover how a brand-attributes card sort can help you identify potential pitfalls and points of disagreement while you improve organisational alignment. Then we’ll discuss where to go from here to conduct a qualitative content audit, prioritise content types and channels and manage scope creep along the way.
These challenges drive content strategy and the business issues beyond it. What if you need to empower a team, wrangle a client and rally everyone around a common vocabulary for your primary navigation? No matter your title, it’s time to embrace content strategy, starting with the message architecture.
What you’ll learn
- Learn how - and why - to establish a hierarchy of communication goals in a message architecture with a hands-on exercise
- Discuss the right questions to ask - and how to ask them - to minimise distracting, off-brand features, like the blog no one has time to update
- Gain additional tools to keep your projects on track, on time and on budget
Who it’s for
The workshop is intended for those in design/content/marketing roles, such as: designers, UX designers, creative directors, marketers, marketing managers, product managers, content strategists, copywriters, social media managers.
About Margot
Margot Bloomstein draws on nearly 20 years of experience helping shape content strategy as a practice and industry by teaching workshops, speaking, and consulting for a range of institutions as the principal of Appropriate, Inc.
She is the author of Content Strategy at Work (2012) and a forthcoming guide for using content and design to foster trust. Margot’s work in message architecture-driven content strategy informs the communication of the American Montessori Society, crisis response at Harvard University, and cultural tourism in the state of Nevada. Her clients also include Fidelity, Lovehoney, Scholastic, Sallie Mae, Lindt and Sprüngli, and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority.
A participant in the inaugural Content Strategy Consortium and featured speaker at SXSW, Margot is a popular speaker at conferences around the world. She also produces BrandSort, teaches in the content graduate program of FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria, and advises Women Talk Design, a network of underrepresented speakers in design and adjacent industries.